“To grab yourself more thinking time, Alan Connor of BBC News Magazine advises: ‘The most common advice boils down to something that might seem obvious: Only work when you’re being paid to work. The rest of the day is yours to do with as you wish - and you may wish to devote it to thought. Obvious, perhaps, but not obvious enough that we do it: ... between 50 and 80 per cent of us skip an actual break for lunch, let alone using the hour for quiet contemplation. You might not have heard the unspeakable expression “eating al desko,” but if you’ve been in an office, you’ve probably witnessed the sorry spectacle of a workstation becoming a dining table for seven minutes and a hastily chomped panino.’”

“Social Studies” in Globe & Mail August 1, 2008

“Despite these appearances the ancient faith was diseased at the bottom and at the top. The deification of the emperors revealed not how much the upper classes thought of their rulers, but how little they thought of their gods. Among educated men philosophy was whittling away belief even while patronizing it.... The rich youths who went to Athens, Alexandria, and Rhodes for higher education found no sustenance there for the Roman creed. Greek poets made fun of the Roman pantheon, and Roman poets leaped to imitate them. The problems of Ovid assumed that the gods were fables; the epigrams of Martial assumed that they were jokes; and no one seems to have complained.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“Though we observe the higher law/ and though we have our quarrel just,/ Were I permitted to withdraw/ You wouldn’t see my arse for dust./ A soldier’s verse”

First of three header quotations in Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era on Section or Chapter VII

“It seems to me this pleasure-mad generation has lost the art of enjoyment.”

G.K. Chesterton in Gloucestershire Echo, Oct. 26, 1925, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)

“Gilbert’s history of man’s story [G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man] has the life of Jesus as the focal point of the world, the ‘crisis of history.’ The development of the Roman Catholic Church is the guiding line throughout history, a guide by which we can judge progress and advancement. Science has no place here, other than as a by-product of the spiritual centre, and man is no more near perfection in 1920 then he was in 1290. There has always been a path to heaven, and a road to somewhere else.”

Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton

“In the end, he [G.K. Chesterton] says, the exaggeration of sex becomes sexlessness. We are no longer drawn to the bait on the hook. We are drawn to the hook itself.”

Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)

In countries they invaded in World War I “the Germans generally insisted on the right to requisition and to demand docility from a population under occupation. They were not alone in this, but they were virtually alone in positing an extreme version of the argument – the idea of Kriegsverrat. According to this view, the disruption of the war effort by civilians in occupied territory is as treasonous as disruption by one’s own nationals. The German occupation of Belgium was consistent with this proposition, and while as a whole certainly not as monstrous as Allied propaganda made it out to be, the occupation policy was nevertheless draconic. If babies were not systematically snatched from mothers’ arms and smashed against brick walls, if nuns were not deliberately sought out for sodomy, rape, and slaughter, if old people were not made to crawl on all fours before being riddled with bullets, considerable numbers of hostages were shot, including women and children and octogenarians. Louvaine was razed, together with its library, founded in 1426, with its 280,000 volumes at its priceless collection of in incunabula and medieval manuscripts. Schrechlichkeit, or frightfulness, was pronounced official policy in the occupied areas, initially in Belgium and then in France in Russia. The term furor teutonicus was used by Germans with pride.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“One of the great blows to stability has been the change in family life, from the first appearance of the teenager in the late 1930s, to Edmund Leach’s disturbing Reith lectures of 1967, which blamed the traditional family for most of society’s problems. There’s been a transformation in the way in which people arrange and furnish their houses, the sort of food they eat and where and how they eat it.”

Peter Hitchens The Abolition of Britain